A real pig's cheer

The Bollinger prize for comic fiction, an award refreshingly untroubled by the desire to chase after the latest young thing, has been awarded to a 60-year-old first-time novelist.

Paul Torday has won the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for his book Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. He will be presented with champagne and 52 volumes of the Everyman Wodehouse edition at the Guardian Hay Festival on May 28. One of the region's famous Gloucester Old Spot pigs will also be named after the winning novel.

On receiving the news, Torday described himself as "delighted, honoured and very surprised" to have won.

"As I adore Bollinger and hugely enjoy the works of PG Wodehouse I will be a very appreciative prize winner," he said, "but above all I couldn't be more pleased that my first novel has had this recognition from the judges.

"I am looking forward to meeting the pig."

Torday's debut melds sharp satire with a meditation on the transforming power of belief in a story of a wealthy Yemeni sheikh who wants to perform a miracle and introduce salmon into the inhospitable climate of his ancestral land, aided by a British prime minister in need of a good news story after too many foreign wars.

The judges praised Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, calling it "a wonderfully engaging and extraordinary tale of love, fly-fishing and political spin ... poignant and hugely entertaining in equal measures."

David Campbell, the publisher who resurrected Everyman books in the 1990s and one of the judges, expressed surprise at the low profile of British comic fiction.

"The British have long excelled at comic writing," he said. "It is extraordinary that ours is the first literary prize for the genre."

Campbell was joined on the panel by the broadcaster James Naughtie, the director of the Hay Fesitval, Peter Florence, and Russia's deputy minister for press, media and mass communication, Vladimir Grigoriev,

Christopher Brookmyre won the 2006 award with All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye, and was thrown into a pen with his prize pig. His eleventh novel, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, will be published later this year. The fate of the pig is unrecorded.